E Ink’s Kaleido 4 promises faster, more vivid colour e-paper displays
E Ink has announced Kaleido 4, a new colour e-paper display designed to improve colour range, contrast and refresh rates. The changes could make future colour e-readers and writing tablets more appealing, while addressing the slower performance and less crisp text that have limited earlier models.
E Ink says the display can show more than 40,000 colours, double the previous colour gamut volume, and play video at 18 frames per second. An oxide backplate is credited with improving refresh rates; unlike Kaleido’s colour filter over black-and-white pigments, E Ink’s Gallery displays use coloured pigments for richer images but refresh more slowly. Kaleido 4 is currently used in the Hanvon M10 C II, a tablet sold only in China, and its real-world improvements still need to be compared with older screens.
- Kaleido 4 aims to improve colour and speed on e-paper.
- E Ink claims support for over 40,000 colours and 18fps video.
- The only current device is a China-only Hanvon tablet.
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E-paper screens use tiny particles to form an image and can keep it visible with little power, which makes them common in e-readers. Colour e-paper adds colour filters to a black-and-white display, but earlier versions have often shown fewer colours and refreshed more slowly than standard tablet screens.
E Ink is a major supplier of e-paper displays, which device makers use in products such as e-readers and writing tablets. Its Kaleido screens use a colour filter over black-and-white particles, while its Gallery screens use coloured particles directly; that approach can produce richer images but refreshes more slowly.
The trade-off matters for people who want colour for books, notes or pictures without a conventional tablet display. How much a new screen improves the experience depends on how it looks and performs in actual devices compared with earlier models.
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Originally published by Engadget as “E Ink’s new Kaleido 4 could inch us closer to the perfect color e-reader”.